Gouging for prison phone calls means we all pay

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Wednesday December 12, 2012 5:52 AM

For two decades now, politicians and public scolds have sold America on the idea of a sterner
penal system. Zero tolerance, three strikes and you’re out, supermax prisons and legions of young
men who have done time — these are the hallmarks of our age.

What’s hidden is that incarcerating people is big business. The corrections industry is
powerful, and it often exemplifies the worst aspects of monopoly capitalism.

Just ask Ulandis Forte. He is a construction worker in the Washington, D.C., area, and he is in
the forefront of a fight to right an injustice few of us are aware of: the exorbitant rates charged
to families who accept phone calls from incarcerated loved ones. A 15-minute call from an inmate
can cost nearly $20. That has nothing to do with any technical or logistical difficulties of
providing the service. It’s a matter of what prison operators can get away with charging. Families
either pay the high fees, which can total hundreds of dollars a month, or forego the chance to stay
in touch.

Forte might just win his battle. In mid-November, the Federal Communications Commission
initiated the process to consider setting price caps for prison phone-service charges; the topic
has been opened for public comments.

If you wonder why this issue matters to Forte, it’s because in June he completed an 18-year
murder sentence. While he was incarcerated, his lifeline was his maternal grandmother, Martha
Wright. It was she who began the battle against the prisons’ price gouging.

Wright raised Forte. She was the only family member who never gave up on him. Wright, 86, is
blind and uses a wheelchair. When Forte was in prison, she tried to visit him no matter where he
was transferred, traveling across the country from her home in Washington, D.C. Yet she couldn’t
keep up as her only grandson was moved from state to state, and she could not afford the
long-distance phone bills. Sometimes, she’d hang up the phone when she heard the words ”A collect
call from….”

That made her angry.

The woman known to her grandson as “Big Mama” became the lead plaintiff of a 2000 class-action
lawsuit against Corrections Corporation of America, a company that operates many of the nation’s
prisons, charging that it conspired with phone companies to create monopolies.

Prison phone rates vary from state to state, but most states take a kickback from phone
companies for every call inmates make, raking in millions of dollars a year. Their take is
typically between 50 percent and 60 percent. Only a handful of states and the District of Columbia
don’t take a cut of the calls.

In 2001, the federal judge hearing the class-action suit ruled that the FCC had primary
jurisdiction over phone rates, kicking the case into limbo.

When Forte was released, he decided to take up the cause his grandmother initiated on his
behalf. He lives in a halfway house now and credits his grandmother with instilling his discipline.
Without her support, he would have exited prison “more hardened, more cold,” he says. She kept him
grounded, reading the Bible.

“I don’t want anything that has to do with negativity. It has no role in my life,” the
38-year-old said.

Ending this kind of gouging is not coddling inmates. It’s consumer fairness. Corporations
shouldn’t profit from skyrocketing rates on a captive market — one that includes 2.7 million
children who have one or more parents in prison.

The problem hits minority and poor communities harder because of their higher rates of
incarceration, the very people least likely able to afford the predatory fees. Opponents argue that
the profits cover higher costs of monitoring inmate calls and can offset the prison rehabilitation
programs. But that is hardly the most enlightened social policy. Disconnect inmates from family and
you undermine a key element of rehabilitation. You take away a powerful means of fighting
recidivism. It means we all pay a higher price in the end to lock up the same people over and
over.

Around the time Forte learned that his grandmother had taken up this fight (Big Mama didn’t let
on at first), he began to worry about her declining health, fearful that she would die before his
release.

She didn’t. Now he’s the activist. He has met with a member of the FCC and is prominent in a
growing coalition of faith leaders and social-justice and prison-reform advocates.

Forte wants to ensure that other inmates have a shot at what he gained by his grandmother’s
insistent love: the chance to complete their sentences, to restart life productively and to reunite
with family members who love them.